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The article presents a report of the similarity of reproductions of the Bender-Gestalt designs when two different methods of motor manipulation are employed. In this study 32 subjects duplicated all the Bender-Gestalt designs on paper and five of them by placing pieces of felt on a felt board. Their performances were rated as to degree of similarity to the standard stimuli on both media and the ratings obtained on the two compared. The results indicate that uniformity actually occurs a minimum of 77 percent of its theoretical possibility and that total disagreement or extreme disagreement occurs only 6 percent of the time. These data are interpreted as indicating that the reproduction of the Bender-Gestalt figures is more influenced by covert perceptual responses than by motor techniques.

This paper reviews several programs for children with special needs, from historical perspectives, current involvements, and one particular orientation, called the ‘child development model.’ With respect to programs based on the child development model, it is recommended that each state consider planning toward the eventual organization of a child development agency, responsible for all children with special needs, irrespective of their characteristics, educational attainments, and prognoses. Further, it is recommended that, to the degree programs encourage and support the maintenance of children in community environments, they should be rewarded in both specific and general ways; and for purposes of better guaranteeing human rights and due process, citizen advisory and other advocacy groups should be organized throughout a state and given such support as would be needed to make these groups active and responsive grass roots partners in policy and decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first year results of a study designed to evaluate through a battery of standardized tests the effectiveness of two preschool programs upon the long range school performance of comparable groups of children. One intervention program provided a traditional nursery school experience (N = 30) which worked in conventional ways to improve the personal, social, and motor development of the children; the experimental intervention provided a highly structured program (N = 30) which focused on specific learning tasks chosen from school related curricula, especially tasks designed to enhance language development and cognitive skills. The experimental program proved to be significantly more effective in promoting intellectual functioning, language abilities, perceptual development, and school readiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neonatal observations and monthly tests of development administered to southern Mexican Indian infants in the first 9 months were coupled with observations in their homes. The behavior of the neonates was strikingly different from Caucasian infants in North America. The mothering practices seemed to reinforce their quiet alertness. Despite little opportunity to practice or "learn" motor and cognitive tasks, the infants' development paralleled that of babies in the United States, but it was delayed by 1 month. The importance of understanding genetic and innate characteristics, as well as environmental influences, in accounting for differences in development among individuals and cultures is emphasized by this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes discrepant mental function in an autistic-savant boy, so labelled because he has the behavior of an autistic child and the cognitive profile of the idiot savant. Major findings of this study are that, perception is adequate for visual discrimination, but not for spatial orientation; superior memory exists for specialized data of limited scope and is explained, not by unusual rates of initial learning, but by a failure to forget; abstract associations are formed while developmentally easier tasks are failed. It is suggested that these contradictions frequently found in psychotic children are a natural developmental outcome of deficiencies in somatic awareness.